Renowned as one of the best restaurants in Sarasota, Walt’s Fish Market (4144 S. Tamiami Trail) serves premium, fresh seafood and has been an institution for more than 100 years. Their success is partly due to the seafood market inside the restaurant, ensuring that meals consist of the freshest catches. Each day, local fishermen deliver an array of fish, shellfish, and crustaceans, making them available for immediate enjoyment.
Whether you’re buying raw from the market or ordering your meal cooked in the restaurant, Walt’s Fish Market’s sea fare is unparalleled. For the table, an order of Firecracker Grouper Bites is highly recommended, lightly panko-fried and tossed in a sweet-and-spicy firecracker sauce. For a main entrée, Walt’s house specialties include a Char-Grilled Plate, featuring a grouper fillet, jumbo shrimp, and sea scallops char-grilled to perfection, as well as the Mahi Fish Tacos, served with citrus slaw, mixed cheese, and salsa verde.
Don’t forget to peruse the market, which has locally sourced, daily catches and globally sourced staples. The selection includes whole fish, fillets, shellfish, and crustaceans. The market is a perfect cap to a meal at Walt’s, like exiting through the best kind of gift shop—one that might inspire you to test your own cooking chops at home.
A Sarasota legacy
The history of Walt’s Fish Market is as epic as any poet’s yarn. It involves a young, immigrant Swede named Claus, a farm boy tired of life in the fields of Indiana. When the Ringling Circus train packed up its tents in Indiana to head south, a teenage Claus seized the opportunity and hopped aboard.
Swapping furrows for bayous, Claus learned to fish from his brother-in-law, a successful commercial fisherman who knew the local waters. Over the decades, Claus sold fresh catches to the community, mastering the trade.
Claus’s son, Walter, would inherit his father’s penchant for fishing, opening the first Walt’s Fish Market. The legacy continues to pass through generations, and now Walt’s remains the only fish market in Sarasota—and among the last few in Florida—that sells and serves fish the day it was caught.
